Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

[Slimprofits]

The legal community dubbed yesterday’s wave of attorney layoffs as ‘Black Thursday,’ as 700 lawyers and legal staff across the U.S. lost their jobs in a single day.

Friday, February 13, 2009, 12:13pm EST | Modified: Saturday, February 14, 2009, 6:00am
Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'
Boston Business Journal - by Lisa van der Pool

[Uno]

Re: Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

Champagne Thursday.

700 only? are they joking?

[grapejelly]

Re: Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

Champagne Thursday.

700 only? are they joking?

760,000 lawyer jobs in the USA, believe it or not.

255,000 jobs lost per year if this was annualized, so it is not insignificant...

[Sharky]

Re: Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

700 lawyers and legal staff across the U.S. lost their jobs in a single day.

First sign of a society recovering its sanity?

[walenk]

Re: Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

"Lawyers being cut", very sad. What ever happened to drawing & quartering? :rolleyes:

[GRG55]

Re: Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

"Lawyers being cut", very sad. What ever happened to drawing & quartering? :rolleyes:

Can an out of work lawyer be re-trained to lubricate a grain harvester?

Yes...

...but only if you put him through it slowly...

[and before all you outraged lawyers respond, I got this from one of my brothers...who's a lawyer...]

[Shakespear]

Re: Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

One of the excellent comments to the first installment by the blogger

we are living by generating financial chuck-and-jive games.

August 3rd, 2007 at 8:09 pm

The letter you published is very moving, and very instructive. What it ought to teach us is that humans do not change.
I have witnessed a number of spates of financial hysteria over tha past 30 years, and every damn time it’s “this time things are different” or a “new parameter”.
It’s never long after the “new parameter” stage that things start ratcheting down the other side of the slope.
Spates of financial euphoria have played out the same way for thousands of years, clear back to the Roman times, when financial markets first formed.
We have seen more of this in the past 30 years than in the tame,stable 50s and 60s for two reasons, I believe.
The first is that we ceased to be a productive economy about 30 years ago, and instead of making our livings by producing goods and delivering valuable services, we are living by generating financial chuck-and-jive games.
The second is that, after 1970 or thereabouts, we lost our collective memory of the chaos and misery wrought by the financial irrationality and malfeasance of the 20s. We lost it when we lost the leadership of my grandparents’ generation, that came of age about 1928 or so, and who were quickly handed very hard lessons in what happens to people who evade reality and live on fantasy. It was people like my grandparents who sat in brokerage firms on that dreadful day in 1929, till 1 AM , trying to clear all the trades that were never going to clear because the money to settle them just wasn’t there. It was they who lost 10 years out of their lives for the next decade, during which you had no chance of advancement and were damn glad you were even employed.
These were the people who ran things in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and they never lost sight of what could happen as a result of lunacy and dishonesty, and as long as they were in charge, we were in good hands. They were extremely conservative and very caring, because they knew the consequences, which were not paper losses, but lost lives and an entire generation of people growing up in poverty and another spending their old age in deeper poverty.
You can’t read this letter and contemplate our current situation without a sense of forboding that not only will the careless, the greedy, and the delusional suffer, but the prudent and honest will suffer with them. We all dwell downstream from the people, and forces, that created this debacle. We might not lose over-levereged homes, but we could see our jobs wiped out as the credit crisis cascades throughout every industry in the country.
It’s great to see good places dropping back into my price range, but when the moment to buy arrives, will I still be employed? Will you?

[petertribo]

Re: Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

Lawyers have a Monopoly Trade Union in the United States. You CANNOT practice law in the US without being a member of that Trade Union. If you want to observe Omerta On Steroids, just study the Legal System.

Here a lawyer explains to the suckers what actually goes on in Court:

What I now refer to as the "courtroom holodeck" is the scene of the crime, and the stage where this chimera is played out. In this virtual reality the judges and attorney(s) are holograms (mere images of justice), all working in the labyrinth of a "Litigation Vortex." The unsuspecting public who either gets sucked into the vortex (unwillingly brought into court) or suckered into the maelstrom (thinking that justice would be received through the legal system), are real characters, but they do not realize they are on the court holodeck, nor do they realize that they are not being protected, or zealously represented as was taught to them in our government-funded elementary schools. They do not realize that nothing is as it appears.

If one falls on to the turf of the holodeck court, one must know the Holodeck Rule Book, who is the real enemy, and understand the holodeck strategies in order to survive and even sometimes thrive in the "Litigation Vortex."

When you voluntarily go into court you will find (or have found) that many times you will lose even though the law is clearly on your side. Then, after the loss, due to your sense of justice, you begin filing lawsuits or complaints against judges, you appeal decisions, and spend time and other resources thinking of other legal strategies for seeking recourse, etc. In essence, you are asking the judges to find themselves corrupt.

When stated that way I think most of you can see that this is probably not going to happen. But even worse, you become occupied for years on a course that costs you large sums of money and keeps you busy with very little to show for it except perhaps high blood pressure. Most often you simply become even more outraged and impoverished than when you innocently started down this path many years before. Simply put, this is what I call the "Litigation Vortex" funneling into a Holodeck Court, where nothing is as it appears and where the plaintiff is never to be seen again — with money. I felt many might benefit and better understand what I say when I tell you to get off the courts' "turf."

http://www.ejfi.org/Courts/Courts-5.htm

One can easily understand then how Congress works, where usually 40-45% of the members are lawyers. And, the final point, our economic futures, we are told, now depend on Congress.

[strittmatter]

Re: Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

Can an out of work lawyer be re-trained to lubricate a grain harvester?

Yes...

...but only if you put him through it slowly...

[and before all you outraged lawyers respond, I got this from one of my brothers...who's a lawyer...]

Thats overkill GRG, as too much grease can be just as detremental as not enough on certain components.

Some areas are starting to offer PHD (Post Hole Digger) training with reasonable tuition fees.

[Munger]

Re: Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

Lawyers have a Monopoly Trade Union in the United States. You CANNOT practice law in the US without being a member of that Trade Union. If you want to observe Omerta On Steroids, just study the Legal System.

Here a lawyer explains to the suckers what actually goes on in Court:

http://www.ejfi.org/Courts/Courts-5.htm

One can easily understand then how Congress works, where usually 40-45% of the members are lawyers. And, the final point, our economic futures, we are told, now depend on Congress.

That article is hilarious. Thanks.

[petertribo]

Re: Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

That article is hilarious. Thanks.

Glad you enjoyed it. Please pass it on to friends; you will save them a lot of grief if they are forewarned. Most of us, unfortunately, must at some time deal with the legal system.

[flintlock]

Re: Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

Lawyer? Yep, way too greasy.

[charliebrown]

Re: Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

This is from a friend of mine who is a corporate lawyer for a fortune 50 corporation, he has been doing this for over 20 years.

"only go to court for a ruling, do not go for justice"

[ASH]

Re: Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

Here a lawyer explains to the suckers what actually goes on in Court:

For what it is worth, my one and only interaction with the courts was when I sued a man in the Magistrate Court of Fulton County, GA, over some furniture he failed to deliver. Mind you, I don't live in Georgia. To do this, I had to look up the proper paperwork on the Magistrate Court's website and get some help over the phone from court clerks. I also had to call the Office of the Secretary of State of Georgia to confirm the legal status of the defendant's supposed LLC. I flew out to Georgia and represented myself... and won. Every aspect of the court system, from clear documentation of filing procedures to phone assistance to the actual court appearance itself worked very smoothly, and was a credit to Fulton county and the state of Georgia.

Mind you, this was a small claims case over small potatoes (there was no jury, and the defendant had no lawyer, himself) -- but the legal system was perfectly clear, and designed such that a layperson such as myself could navigate it successfully without a lawyer. This anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything, but what it showed me is that in the absence of lawyers, the system itself is designed to be fairly transparent and user-friendly. My guess is that lawyers create their own need -- if one side has legal counsel, then the other side needs it too. Take the lawyers out of the system, and the system itself is actually pretty good.

***added***

I'm not really saying that the system would work just fine without lawyers. Most legal matters are more complex than my small claims case, and one would be a fool to try to represent themselves. However, I think the aspects of the law that are fundamentally simple seem to be implemented fairly well, and lawyers are superfluous in those cases.

[Munger]

Re: Lawyers recount 'Black Thursday'

Glad you enjoyed it. Please pass it on to friends; you will save them a lot of grief if they are forewarned. Most of us, unfortunately, must at some time deal with the legal system.

I deal with it daily - albeit from the inside. I cannot think of an instance in which a lawyer failed to advise a client of litigation costs vs. probability of wining/amount of likely judgment. The piece was just so hyperbolic and removed from reality as to be hilarious.

The legal system is costly. Often too costly for disputes that involve small sums. The system in place is that way largely due to attempting to achieve fairness, however - this evolutionarily derived system we use in the US is called common law. The Rules of Civil Procedure and concept of Jurisdiction are two fundamental examples of necessary and complicated legal doctrines that have evolved over time to attempt to achieve fairness. Laws that have evolved over hundreds of years, being revised and having exceptions added for each unforeseen circumstance tend to become complicated.

This libertarian idea of non-licensed attorneys being held back by "the system" is hilarious. It is not that difficult to be admitted to a state bar - a JD and a (very very) minimum level of competence is all that is required. I can see arguing that the JD should not be necessary. Passing the state bar is an extremely low threshold to weed out complete charlatans though. It is probably too easy in most instances. You should see some of the mind-garbage that licensed attorneys sometimes submit.